


How to (re)Build a Home

by gooseberry



Series: Porcelain Figures [2]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Childbirth, Cousins, Family Feels, Gen, Genderswap, Hobbit Women, Homecoming, Inheritance, Pregnancy, aunts, fem!Bilbo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:55:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/888050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And then she is back in her hobbit hole, her beautiful Bag End with its warm wood and cool stone and sweet-smelling air. Gandalf follows her directions for days, pushing this desk into that corner, and turning that chair in this direction. She has him move the furniture again and again as she searches for the Bag End she had left over a year ago, and it takes nearly a week before she realizes it.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“It seems smaller,” she tells Gandalf, when she realizes she has been counting the footsteps it takes to move from the back door to the front. “It had been large before—homey, but large. Now it seems very small.”</i>
</p>
<p>---<br/>The sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/766950">The Art of Inheriting Crockery</a>; in which Briony returns to the Shire, has a baby, and tries to rebuild her home. Basically, it's all fem!Bilbo, Gandalf, hobbit ladies, and also pregnancy. It’s also chockfull of family feels, and home feels, and all those pesky family politics so prevalent in the Shire. And cousins. So many cousins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They roll into the Shire together, sitting side-by-side on a little pony wagon. The wagon cannot be comfortable for Gandalf--his bent knees are jutting up nearly to his chin--but it is comfortable for Briony, with the seat just low enough that her feet can reach the footrest. 

Gandalf had found the wagon months ago, when Briony first began showing. He’d left in the early morning, when it was still gray and foggy, and he’d told her, “Wait here, Briony--you’ll be quite safe, and I won’t be long.”

When he’d come back, it had been the next morning, and he had been driving the little pony wagon.

“It was of no great cost,” he’d told her cheerfully. “A pony and a wagon for only a little gold, and I dare say we have more than enough of that. I’ve already sent the horse home to Beorn. It will,” he said, his voice a growing a little graver, “slow us down on the road, but I believe comfort will be far more important that speed.”

She’d blushed then, and blushed even more when he’d shown her the bed of the wagon, stuffed full of blankets and pillows and thick duvets. “Am I supposed to begin my lying in so soon?” she’d asked with feeble humor, but he’d laughed.

They’d tied the baggage pony and Briony’s little riding pony to the back of the wagon, and then they had turned west.

West, west--they always headed west, and when Briony walked on the ground, she thought she could feel the difference in the earth itself. The ground thawed with the spring, and the grass grew green and clean, and Briony could taste the promise of rain on her tongue.

“I’m glad to be going home,” she’d whispered to Gandalf as she rode beside him. Gandalf had hummed and flicked the reins, and when Briony, tired and sun-warmed, had leaned against him, he’d wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

The road was long, and tiring, but there was a thread of pleasantness beneath it all. Gandalf was clever and kind, and far more patient with her now than he had been a year ago. He always seemed to find fresh berries, no matter that it was still springtime, and there was always another handful of tealeaves tucked into his bags. It was magic, Briony thought--the way his hand on her forehead was so soothing, and the way the wagon rolled along more smoothly than the road should allow. Magic, and the kindness of a wizard.

Once, when she was lying in the bed of the wagon, looking up at the cloud-streaked sky, she had rapped at the seat-board of the wagon and had asked, “Was it supposed to be this way?”

“No, Briony,” Gandalf had said as the wagon slowly tumbled along the road. He sighed, loud enough that Briony could hear it, and he said, “Nothing was meant to be this way.”

She’d pulled a duvet over her face then, squishy and musty, and she’d muffled her crying, because she hated to cry in front of Gandalf.

But now they’re rolling into the Shire, side-by-side, and Briony is leaning against Gandalf’s side, feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

“It’s all the same,” she says in a cracked voice, and she swallows, says, “It is, but I’m not.”

Gandalf smiles at her, and says, “You found more worlds than I thought you would, my dear.”

And when they reach Hobbiton, and Briony’s Bag-End, they find nothing at all. Briony’s beautiful green door is unlocked, and when she pushes it, it opens to a long, empty tunnel. The stone floor is cool beneath her feet, and the tunnel smells like faint dust and freshly polished wood. She looks at the gleaming panels of wood, and at the empty floors, and she barely hears herself croak, “It is all gone--”

“Steady, steady, my dear,” Gandalf’s voice says at a great distance, and she is only aware that she’s falling when he catches her. His hands are very big, bigger even than Thorin’s, and he is holding her arms so gently as he says, “Sit down, right here--I’ll find you a pillow, and we will sort this out.”

He fetches pillows and blankets out of the wagon, and then he leads her to the parlor. Her chair is gone, and so are her little tables; her knickknacks and her little porcelain figures. Gandalf sets her back down, right in the middle of the empty room, and he sits in front of her, taking her hands into his. His hands are old, wrinkled and dry, and wonderfully warm; he rubs her hands between his, and she watches him do so until she feels that she has caught her breath.

“There must have been an auction,” she says at last, and when Gandalf pats her hand, she squares her shoulders and says, “Well, I will see about having my things returned, first thing in the morning.”

Gandalf tuts disapprovingly, and Briony smiles at him and fights back the urge to cry. “It’s only one more night without a bed,” she says as brightly as she can; Bungo would be proud of her, she thinks--she can barely feel her mouth quiver at all. “At least we’ll have a roof over our heads.”

She makes a bed the best she can, there in the parlor. It’s not particularly comfortable, and she spends most of the night twisting awkwardly on the floor, trying to find a way to lie that doesn’t dig her hip into the hard floor or leave her back aching from her belly. She doesn’t get much sleep, between the discomfort of the floor and the baby’s kicking. Still, as uncomfortable as she may be, it is nice to have her roof over her head again--to see the beautifully arched beams and the prettily painted ceiling.

“At least,” she says blearily, when the baby has kicked hard enough to wake her, “Longo’s family hasn’t moved in yet.”

In the morning, she takes the time to wash her face and hands, and to brush the hair on her head and her feet. There’s not much she can do about her clothes--they are all travel-stained, and though they’ve all been let out as much as possible, and have had scraps of fabric sewn in, they still fit too tightly around her belly. When she’s made herself as presentable as possible, she leaves her home, closing her beautiful green door behind her.

She goes to Fortinbras first, to let him know that she’s returned, and to ask him for his help. He’s not her favorite cousin--that honor goes to Jessamine--but she’s always been fond of Fortinbras, even though he did marry that silly Lalia Clayhanger. More important than Briony’s fondness for Fortinbras, though, is that Fortinbras is the Thain now, and has been for several years. If anyone is to know where all of Briony’s things have gone, it will be him.

When Fortinbras sees her, he gives her one long look, then says, “Well, you’ve come back sooner than I thought. We have some of your things, what we could manage to save in the auction. Not much, I’m afraid, but we should be able to get the rest back, I should think.”

Then he opens up his arms and says, “Welcome home, Briony.”

x

In the end, she gets back nearly all of her things, though it takes a good portion of her gold and silver from Erebor to do so. Gandalf remarks at the apparent ease with which Briony buys back everything from her books and maps to her mother’s crockery. 

“Trust hobbits,” Gandalf says thoughtfully as he helps Briony repack a trunk of linens, “to be so organized.”

Briony herself finds nothing remarkable in it. She’s tired and cross and wants nothing more than to be able to firmly ensconce herself back in her hobbit hole, never to leave again. And even more than that, she wants to be done with staying in smials of Tuckborough; she’s utterly exhausted of listening to Lalia complain about foot-aches and backaches and headaches and any other sort of ache that pops into Lalia’s head.

“I want to go home,” she hisses as Gandalf hands her a tea towel her grandmother had embroidered. Briony inspects the stitchery, then folds the towel and sets it in the trunk. “I’d rather do this in my own hobbit hole, than here. If I have to feel Lalia’s head one more time for one of her supposed fevers--”

But when she does leave Tuckborough, it’s with a pang of heartache wrapped in thankfulness. Fortinbras has done so much for her, has saved so many of her things, her trinkets and her journals and her gloryboxes, filled with her mother’s handiwork. She thanks him tearfully, and he pats her back awkwardly, and she whispers in his ear, “I’m glad that I am a Took.”

And then she is back in her hobbit hole, her beautiful Bag-End with its warm wood and cool stone and sweet-smelling air. Gandalf follows her directions for days, pushing this desk into that corner, and turning that chair in this direction. She has him move the furniture again and again as she searches for the Bag-End she had left over a year ago, and it takes nearly a week before she realizes it.

“It seems smaller,” she tells Gandalf, when she realizes she has been counting the footsteps it takes to move from the back door to the front. “It had been large before--homey, but large. Now it seems very small.”

“It is a hill,” Gandalf says with that irritating logic he seems to have, “which is quite small when compared to a mountain.”

“Well,” Briony says, and then she says again, “Well.” She clears her throat, then squares her shoulders and lifts her chin. “It will be home again soon enough, I’m sure of that. Now, would you move that wardrobe again? I think it would fit much better on the other side of the bed.”

Gandalf remains with her for months. She asks him why one late night, when she is sipping tea in the kitchen. Gandalf is buttering a thick slice of bread, scraping the butter across the bread with both sides of the knife like he is sharpening the blade. When she asks why he has stayed, he hums irritatingly, and continues scraping butter onto the bread.

“I suppose,” he finally says when he has, in her opinion, put far too much butter onto the bread, “it is because I promised to bring you home, to the best of my ability.” His head is bent down, and when he looks at her through his bushy eyebrows, he looks old and wise, and not nearly as homely as he usually does. “I hadn’t realized,” he continues, “that I had promised that to two hobbits, but that’s a problem easily remedied.” 

She stopped blushing months ago, and so she doesn’t blush now: she only turns the teacup in her hand, feeling the bottom of the cup scrape over her palm as she rotates the handle to one side, then to the other. 

“You were never responsible for anything,” she says. The tea in the cup is rippling, from the walls of the cup inwards. “I did everything on my own. Even your nudge--I would have stumbled upon an adventure sooner or later. It’s the Took blood.”

It’s a lie--or at least, it is most likely a lie. She thinks that, without Gandalf bringing dwarves to her door, she would have passed the last year and a half very quietly, without stirring beyond the borders of the Shire. Still, there’s no knowing what her life would have been, and there is no point in wondering; what’s done is done, and she is finished with her adventures, and firmly in the seat of her home.

“Thorin would have been furious,” she says after she has sipped at her tea. Gandalf is eating the bread slowly, methodically, and it is only his nod that assures her that he’s heard her. “No one was to know. He wasn’t even to know.” She sips her tea, and says, “He never wanted this.”

“What Thorin wanted and what he needed were very different things, Briony.” Gandalf says it with utter surety and Briony thinks, not for the first time, that Gandalf knew Thorin far better than Briony ever did. She wishes there was a way for her to say so--that there was a way to say, _I wish I’d known him better_ , or even to say, _I wish I’d known him at all, because I think I never did_. These are her thoughts to bear, though; she won’t throw them onto Gandalf, not on top of all the other worries that make Gandalf’s face look old and worried. 

“I think I’ll go back to bed,” Briony says instead. She takes another sip of tea--small, so she won’t have to get up too soon to piss--and then begins to push herself up. When Gandalf makes a motion to stand himself, Briony grunts, “No, I’m fine, just slow.” 

“Sleep well, my dear,” Gandalf says when Briony’s managed to get herself up onto her feet. Briony smiles at him, and says,

“And you, Gandalf.”

x

She cries a great deal. She doesn’t mean to, particularly, but she still seems to find herself crying at all hours of the day. When they had been traveling, Briony had tried to hide her tears into the back of the pony wagon, muffling her mouth with the warm duvets, scrubbing her eyes with the cuffs of her sleeves. The struggle of hiding her tears had often been enough to stop her crying--it was hard to get up the energy for a good cry when one was breathing in the distinct smell of wet feathers. Now that she’s home, she has the entirety of Bag-End in which to hide her crying, and she takes to it with the same ferocity she takes to cleaning her home.

She cries in the pantry, and in the cellar, and in the garden. She cries as she sweeps out the smoking room and as she washes her mother’s crockery, and she even cries when she makes up Gandalf’s bed. Mostly, though, she cries when she’s in her own bed; she cries for her mother and her father, and for her aunts and uncles who have already died. She cries for her dwarves, for the wine she used to share with Dori, and for the way Dwalin had always been there to help her down from high places; for Ori’s awkward enthusiasm and Bofur’s dirty jokes and Oin’s compassion. Most of all, though, she cries for Fili and Kili’s youth, and for Thorin’s stubborn determination.

The first time Gandalf catches her at it, she is scrubbing at the bottom of a pan, and weeping as though her heart will break--though perhaps it already has. She doesn’t realize that Gandalf is there, not until he’s prying the pan from her hands and is saying, “Briony, my dear, what has happened?”

“Give that back,” Briony snaps, breathless from her crying, and she smacks Gandalf’s hands with her soapy washcloth. “Let me-- No, Gandalf, give it back, let me have it.”

When she’s finished washing the pan--Gandalf standing behind her all the while--she wipes her hands dry on her apron, then slumps until she can rest her elbows on the counter beside the basin for washing. When she lifts her shoulders, it stretches her back, easing the ache, and she sighs heavily.

“I can cry if I choose,” she says at last, feeling defensive. “I hardly cried at all on the journey--not once after the spiders, except the one time Thorin made me cry. But hardly at all, and I think I deserve--I think that I deserve a good cry, Gandalf, or even a hundred, if I want them.”

“Of course,” Gandalf’s voice says, sounding so sober. Briony sighs again, and rubs her thumb against the ache behind her temple.

“It’s not that I am only sad. I’m sad, of course I am--how could I not be, with Thorin, and with Fili and Kili--but I’m happy to be home.” She tries to smile, and when it feels right to her, she turns and smiles for Gandalf. “It’s not so bad,” she tells him; maybe it’s foolish, to try to comfort a wizard, but Briony can’t help but think that Gandalf must be as broken-hearted as Briony is herself. “I have my home, and everything in it, and now I even have a wizard.”

Gandalf’s chuckle is short, but it sounds real. “I will be here,” he says, “for as long as you shall need me.”

It is still the kindness of a wizard, tempered by patience that Briony’s never seen from Gandalf before. Briony never asks Gandalf why he is kind, or why he is patient; he tells her in his own way.

“I remember,” he says once, when they are sitting by the backdoor. It is quiet here, with only the buzzing of fat bees and the rasp of the summer wind on the rosebushes. Briony is wrapping a ball of soft yarn, and Gandalf is smoking. “When you were born,” Gandalf says between puffs. “You were the first granddaughter--and born to Gerontius’s eldest daughter! He was beside himself. I believe everyone was. He threw one of his parties, with enough food to feed the entirety of the Shire.”

“Did he?” Briony asks, feeling pleased at the thought. She remembers the Old Took’s parties fondly--and she remembers the Old Took even more fondly. He’d been fat and gray, and he always wore a beautiful yellow waistcoat, with toys hidden in the pockets. 

“He loved all his children, there was no question, but he loved each one differently. Your mother, I believe, reminded him most of himself.”

Briony listens to the stories hungrily. She was young when her parents died, and they were never more than her parents. To listen to stories about them, to think of them as people beyond her childhood--it’s delicious and beautiful, and she asks Gandalf, “Did he follow her to see the elves?” and “Were you at their wedding?”

“Not the wedding,” Gandalf says with wisps of smoke. “I am sorry I missed it. I always heard it was quite the Tookish affair. But,” he says, straightening up, “I was very fond of your father. He was a steady fellow, and he was always very determined. I suppose that is the Baggins blood.”

Briony slowly winds the yarn as Gandalf slowly winds the stories, dozens of lives that were in motion long before Briony was born. When the ball of yarn is finished, and Briony is tucking the end neatly away, she asks, “I wonder why children never seem to realize that their parents had lives before them.”

“That answer is easy.” Gandalf is cleaning his pipe, knocking it gently against the palm of his hand with soft, hollow taps. “Children are selfish creatures, my dear. That is what makes them so charming.”

x

Amaranth comes to stay at the end of the summer. She fits herself into Bag-End beautifully, as though she has always been there, and within days, Briony cannot remember what Bag-End was like without Amaranth.

“I’m the grateful one,” Amaranth says. “I feel as though I’ve been in Buckland for ages. You know Father--he always worries whenever anyone tries to leave the Hall. This is like a holiday--a lovely one, by the way. Your smial is a bit like paradise, after all those children.”

Amaranth is fat and loud and unerringly cheerful. She gossips all day, telling Briony stories of everything that Briony’s missed in the past year. She knows everyone’s birthdays and she remembers stories from everyone’s weddings; she has a peculiar way of scrunching up her nose when imitating voices, and she always listens to Gandalf’s stories with open-mouthed delight.

Bag-End begins to bustle, with three people tucked away inside. When Briony idly mentions how she’d missed the busyness of a family, Amaranth laughs and says, “Busy? This? This is peace and quiet I haven’t known before. Rorimac’s boys are so _loud_ , I feel like I can never hear myself think--oh, I hope you have a girl. I think they’re easier. Mother says that they’re easier.”

Still, it’s busyness to Briony, and a comfort. She grows used to the sound of Gandalf muttering to himself, and to the sound of Aramanth trotting from one end of the smial to the other, puffing excitedly. Briony herself feels slow and heavy, like she is some great beast, lumbering through the rooms of Bag-End. Everything has become a challenge: standing up is nearly impossible and sitting down is always uncomfortable. The baby kicks whenever Briony puts her feet up, and Briony’s feet ache whenever she is standing for longer than a few minutes. She feels tired and short of temper, and she feels horribly needy.

“Everyone does,” Amaranth says gently, in a surprisingly quiet voice. “Gilda made me sit with her for weeks before Saradoc was born.”

It is like Amaranth has given permission for something Briony never even knew she wanted. She finds herself following Amaranth through the back rooms, and sitting beside Gandalf whenever Gandalf is in the parlor. She wants to be near someone all the time, and when she hears the echo of voices from the hallway, or a sliver of laughter through a shut door, she aches with a loneliness that seems rooted in her belly.

The baby is born on the last day of August. The labor pains begin the early morning, and as soon as the sun is up, Amaranth leaves to find neighborhood tweens, whom she presumedly sends off to Tuckborough and Bucklebury. Briony’s aunts and cousins begin to arrive within hours, coming on foot and in pony carts.

Belba and Linda arrive first, and they set themselves down in the kitchen, saying, “Well, we should have a breakfast while we wait. This is your first, it will be a while yet before it’s born.”

“I hope it isn’t,” Briony says faintly, feeling rather alarmed at the prospect of the baby taking any longer than it is already taking. 

“Oh, it will,” Linda says, in that all-knowing way she has. She pointedly looks Briony up and down, and then she says, “It will be the biggest baby in the Shire, if your belly has anything to say with it.”

Bag-End fills up after that, with her mother’s sisters and her first and second cousins. The kitchen is overrun with hobbit women, and they talk and laugh and eat, and Briony feels rather put-out about the entire thing. She couldn’t eat, even if she wanted to, and she feels like a child again, surrounding by clucking aunts and laughing cousins. 

“Is this really necessary?” she asks Jessamine. Jessamine is walking up and down the long hall of Bag-End with Briony, and Briony feels sullen and angry at being made to walk. She aches from head to toe, and every labor pain folds her up like a crumpled paper doll. She doesn’t _care_ if walking is supposed to help--she just wants to be _done_.

“Oh, yes,” Jessamine says, and at least she’s sympathetic. “Mother would never let you do this alone--or with a _wizard_ \--”

The day lasts forever. The sun rises slowly, and then it hangs in the sky, refusing to come back down. Briony walks through the rooms of Bag-End, leaning against Jessamine and Amaranth and Asphodel. The pains grow worse, and longer; the reprieves between each contraction grow shorter, and shorter. The sun doesn’t move. 

Briony is exhausted. She hurts. She wants Thorin--help her, but she wants Thorin so much. She wants the callouses on his hands and the gruffness of his kindness and the way he always looked irritated by her; she wants something she can’t name, the something that used to lodge in her belly whenever Thorin’s beard would rub against her face.

She clings to her cousins, and she weeps. “I can’t,” she cries, “I can’t--”

“You’re doing fine,” they say. “You’re so much closer now. It won’t be long now.”

But it _is_ long--it seems to take a lifetime. The reprieves are too short, and the contractions are too long, and it feels like the day has gone on for an age. She leans on her cousin, her arms thrown around Jessamine’s neck, and she rocks. She groans, because it feels like even words are leaving her--it feels as though she’s being unmade, unraveled from her very center.

“Bear down,” Jessamine tells her. “Briony, you must bear down now--”

Briony clutches at Jessamine’s hands, and she howls like an animal--or maybe, perhaps, she howls like a soldier.

The baby is born near the end of the day. The sun is low in the sky when her baby finally makes its entrance, and Briony feels like she’s about to die.

“A boy,” Asphodel says, and then she says, “Your belly was so large, I thought it would take longer.”

“Don’t,” Briony says weakly, and she lets her head loll against Amaranth’s breast. She’s exhausted--she feels like she’s nothing left at all, but a few wisps of yarn, barely holding together. Her muscles are tingling all through her body, and she aches like she’s never ached before. When she hears a hiccuping cry, though, she feels a new ache begin in her chest. 

“A boy?” Briony asks, and she struggles to sit upright. Asphodel is kneeling on the floor beside Briony, and she is wiping a baby-- _Briony’s baby_ \--clean of blood and gunk. “Let me see--”

“He’s big,” Asphodel says, but Jessamine interrupts, saying crossly, 

“The afterbirth first, Briony.”

It feels like another age before Briony can see her baby. She twists around awkwardly, trying to watch as Asphodel carries the baby to Briony’s bed, where towels and blankets have been put to the side. Every one of the baby’s shuddering cries makes Briony feel even more anxious; it’s only Jessamine’s hands that keep Briony in place, that hold Briony down.

“I have to see,” Briony tries to plead, but Jessamine’s fingers are like steel and Briony’s legs are like water. She stays there, on a pile of old towels, twisted around as she tries to catch a glimpse of her baby. She’s only dimly aware of the contractions beginning again, of the way Jessamine is pressing down on Briony’s belly. 

“There,” she hears Jessamine say from what seems to be a very great distance, “that’s done. Ama, help me get her up--”

When they stand her on her feet, she feels light headed and suddenly cold. “I’m cold,” she says rather stupidly. Jessamine laughs at this, and Briony would snap at her, but her knees are shaky and her whole body is shivering. 

“I’m cold,” she says again, just as stupidly as before, and she lets Jessamine and Amaranth strip her of her bloody shift. They wash her quivering legs and pull a fresh shift over her head, then they bustle her into her bed, laying towels beneath her and tucking quilts around her.

“It’s fine,” Jessamine says, “It’s normal.”

Briony wants to laugh at that, because she’s not quite sure how any of this could be normal. It seems absurd to her, the last few hours--and the last year and a half, too, this madcap adventure into which she’s managed to throw herself. Before she manages to laugh, though, she hears her baby start to cry again.

x

She had thought a baby would seem very small, but hers only seems very big. He’s an enormously fat thing, and when she tries to imagine that he was curled up in her belly only hours ago, she gets a queer feeling, like she’s being unraveled all over again. It is enough that she settles for not thinking at all, except for the way that his fingers all have little fingernails, and his toes all have little toenails.

“He’s big,” Mirabella says, and Linda clucks her tongue and says,

“He’s enormous. I’m surprised he came out so quickly.”

“Quickly,” Briony says dryly, and Linda clucks her tongue again.

“Yes, quickly. My Odo wasn’t nearly so big, and he was days in coming. _Days_ ,” she repeats loudly as Belba harrumphs loudly.

Bag-End is filled with hobbit women for days. Briony’s not sure where they are all sleeping, but when she tries to ask, Rosa scolds her, saying, “We can all find a place to sleep well enough.”

“It’s a bit of a holiday for them, I suppose,” Briony tells Gandalf when Gandalf is finally allowed back into the smial, and into Briony’s bedroom. She can hear laughter coming from the kitchen, and the sound of hobbits knocking about in the study. “The whole place will be shockingly clean,” she adds, “and there will probably be a dozen pies and loaves of bread in the pantry, but I’m sure they’ll drink all of my wine.”

“Is it usually this large a to-do?” Gandalf asks. His bushy eyebrows are lifted high, and he’s looking rather startled. Briony muffles the urge to laugh (it still hurts to do much of anything, especially laugh), and says,

“No, I don’t believe so. I never stay so long, that is for certain. I suppose it’s because my mother is gone. Well,” she says as another thought, “that, and I suppose they’re making a show of things. I’m certain there’s been plenty of gossip.”

Bungo, she thinks a little sadly, would probably be horrified, if he knew the state in which his daughter had gotten herself. Running off on an adventure, then coming home with a child--and one that doesn’t even look entirely hobbit-like. Still, there are many hobbits born only three or four months after their parents’ marriages--and respectability, Briony knows, has a great deal more to do with how much money one has, and whether or not one has a properly tended garden and a pantry open for guests. She can rebuild her respectability; she can rebuild her home, too, until each room is as warm and alive as it was when her parents were still alive.

“He doesn’t seem quite the piece for so much gossip,” Gandalf murmurs. He’s bent over the baby’s bassinet, and he’s waggling his finger in the air. Briony’s not sure why--the baby seems to do very little, other than sleeping and eating. She can’t imagine that the baby is awake, or that he is watching Gandalf’s finger. 

“Isn’t there?” She hums thoughtfully before saying, “Does he look much like a dwarf? I can’t decide. I think that perhaps his nose is a little large, but then, my father’s nose was large, too. But he is an enormously fat thing.”

“That he is. No, my dear, I don’t think he looks very much like a dwarf. At the least, he has a great deal less hair.”

The days have only helped her baby, she thinks. He’s far less red now, and his face, though still squashed, looks less cross. Mostly, though, she has spent hours searching his face for any bit of Thorin, or any dwarvish features. She’s not sure what dwarvish babies look like, and other than the baby’s sheer size--which puts her more in mind of Bombur than Thorin--the baby doesn’t seem very dwarvish at all. Perhaps that is a blessing--or even luck.

“He has your approval, then?” Briony asks Gandalf. Gandalf nods, still seeming entranced by the baby, and Briony covers her smile with her hands. “And what were you doing, while banished from Bag-End?”

“Wandering,” Gandalf says. He straightens up from the bassinet, tugging his beard aright, then turns enough so he can sit on the edge of Briony’s bed. “Listening to the gossip. There is a great deal, my dear, but it is all about _you_. I hadn’t even heard you had had a son until I was allowed in the door.”

“Oh.” Briony licks her lower lip, then says, “Well, having a son changes things, doesn’t it? I’m sure everyone is deciding what they want to say when they leave. Donnamira still hasn’t forgiven Camelia and Lobelia for the wedding fiasco, and of course Jessa has to side with her, and so does Mirabella and Amaranth and Asphodel. And Belba, well, since her Herugar married Jessa, that means Belba always sides with Jessa, and of course she’s always liked Donna, too. And Linda always loved Father the most, so she’s always said I should keep Bag-End. But then, Camelia and Chica have always felt slighted, because Linda and Belba are so very--” Briony sneaks a glance at the door, then continues her breathless whisper, saying, “Well, you know what they’re like. They’re nice to any of the Baggins, but Camelia and Chica aren’t really Baggins, not to Belba’s mind, and certainly not to Linda’s.”

“I see,” Gandalf says in a tone of voice that says that, really, he doesn’t see at all. Briony grimaces, then says,

“Longo and Otho may never get Bag-End now, and that makes the Tooks very happy--and the Brandybucks, too, you know how they’re always marrying each other. But _that_ is why Camelia and Chica never came, and _that_ is why my home is still overrun.” Her voice is rising by the end, and she shuts her mouth with a clack of her teeth. Gandalf is frowning at her, and when he reaches out to pat her hand, she sighs.

“Would you have preferred to be alone?” Gandalf asks, and Briony sighs again.

“No,” she says, “I wouldn’t have. I am grateful, and even if it’s only because of Donnamira’s stubborness--well.” Her throat feels tight and she has to swallow before she can manage to say, “It would be nice if I could keep my home, and even give it to Drogo.”

She fidgets with the quilt drawn over her knees, running her thumb along an appliquéd flower. When Gandalf says nothing, Briony admits, “I’m just tired, and there are a rather lot of them. It’s one thing to see them all at a wedding or a party, and quite another to have them all in my home. But,” she tries gamely for some strength of humor, “at least Belba didn’t bring along Ruby, or any of the Bolgers or Goodbodies.”

Gandalf chuckles at that, and Briony feels herself begin to smile again.

“You’d better go,” she tells him, giving him fair warning. “I’m sure someone will be by soon, to scold me for something or another. They’ll probably eat you alive, if they catch you trying to make me laugh.”

He doesn’t leave, but he does move from her bed, sitting down in an armchair instead. He behaves himself admirably, all things considered, and Briony sleepily thinks that Linda would be quite taken with him, if she gave him a chance to charm her. 

Briony tells Gandalf as much, and Gandalf smiles, saying, “I can think of few better things, my dear Briony, than to be well-liked by a Baggins.”


	2. Chapter 2

The autumn is a haze, the slow fading of the summer warmth and the shortening of the days. Bag-End quiets over the weeks, as Briony’s aunts and cousins return home. There is always someone there--Amaranth or Asphodel or even Belba--willing to cook or to clean or to just sit in the parlor with Briony, to talk together about the most idle of things. Gandalf stays, too, all through the autumn. He leaves sometimes, to walk through the Shire for a day or two, but he always comes back to Bag-End, with leaves caught on the wide brim of his hat and his beard tangled from the autumn winds. 

“It’s a lovely season,” Briony tells him once, when he’s just returned. He still smells like the cool air from outside, the crispness of apples and the warm sweetness of grains. When he unwraps his scarf, it feels like he’s brought a bit of the world into her little home.

“It is,” he agrees; “I wonder why you have not ventured out into it. I believe you have more than enough blankets to wrap the baby in, if you wished to take him out with you. Or,” he says as he begins to fold his scarf, “if you preferred to walk alone, I am certain your cousin would be happy to sit by him for a short while.”

Briony laughs at that, and she thinks of leaving her little hobbit hole. She thinks of what it would be like, to wander down the Hill by herself, to slowly idle through the market. She hasn’t been to the market since before she left for Erebor, and there are so many hobbits she hasn’t seen. But in the end, she only stands in her doorway, only takes the dozen steps necessary to climb down to her little gate.

She watches the season change from behind her fence: the fields of wheat to the south of the Hill, the brightly colored bushes on the other side of the path, the fading blossoms of her rosebushes on either side of her door.

“I could climb over the Hill,” she tells Amaranth and Gandalf one early afternoon, when Drogo has fallen asleep after a feeding. 

It must be some sort of signal, for before Briony is quite aware of what is happening, she is being bundled out of the front door, her hand held quite firmly in Amaranth’s. A wrap has been thrown around her shoulders, uneven and draggling behind her, and she fumbles with it, trying to catch the trailing end as Amaranth tugs her down the steps to the back gate.

“Drogo,” Briony says stupidly, following Amaranth through the gate.

“He’s sleeping,” Amaranth says, and, “The wizard can watch him well enough,” and then--then they are on the dusty little road that runs up the Hill. Amaranth stops and turns to help Briony fix the wrap, and Briony lets her. 

It is a beautiful day--the sky is a blue so bright it is almost white, and the air is still all autumn crisp. When Briony glances out over the Hill, past the decline on the far side of the road, she can see the wheat and barley fields, some mown down to stubble, other fields still filled with tall grains. There are hobbits down there, mowing and threshing, and Briony wonders if there will be a party soon, to celebrate the end of the harvest.

She takes a deep breath and holds it, feeling dizzy with the clean brilliance of the season.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Amaranth asks quietly, and Briony lets go of her breath like it’s an explosion and grins madly at her.

“It is,” Briony says, and she takes Amaranth’s hand, twines their fingers together and holds tight. “Should we run?”

Amaranth is too fat and Briony’s breasts are too tender, and they only make it a few dozen yards down the road before they can run no further. They walk instead--swinging their arms and chattering, stopping here and there to pick flowers. It feels as though there is a weight falling from Briony’s shoulders, like the freshness of the air is dispelling a shroud that was clinging to her. 

“Your color is better,” Amaranth says when they have reached the top of the Hill. The wind is stronger here, catching at their hair and their dresses. Briony tucks a loose curl back behind her ear, then pulls the wrap closer about her shoulders. She can see the whole of the Party Field below them, the Party Tree casting a long shadow out across the pond. She can see the road that wraps around the Hill, bending south as it runs from west to east. And to the east, if she squints, she imagines that she can see a smudge of mountains on the far horizon.

(It is a fantasy, a feverish turn of her brain. It’s the romanticism of the Tooks, the same daydreaming air that had Belladonna gazing out the windows for all the years after Bungo died.)

They sit at the top of the Hill for an hour, nearly two; until Briony’s breasts have begun to ache and the tips of her ears and her nose have grown cold. She sighs, listing to the left so she can lean heavily against Amaranth.

“We should go back,” she says. “He’ll be waking soon, if he hasn’t already.”

They go down the Hill as they had climbed it, speaking quietly together, their hands clutching their bunches of flowers. Briony feels restless and torn--a part of her wants to drag her feet, to spend long minutes looking out over the pretty hills and fields of Hobbiton. Another part of her is anxious to be home, to rush back to Drogo and to her smial. The compromise is an odd sort of gait, a fast pace broken up by long pauses as they consider the countryside and the color of leaves and the odd patch of wildflowers.

When they arrive at the smial, Gandalf is standing at the door, holding a screaming Drogo. Briony’s chest aches, a dull pain that cuts through her breasts and through her heart, and she reaches up for Drogo, murmuring, “Oh, my sweet--”

Drogo is hungry and furious--furious enough that it takes him long minutes to calm enough to latch onto Briony’s breast. He nurses fiercely, with as much energy as he was screaming, and Briony curls over him, petting the softness of Drogo’s cheek and the curl of his brow with the soft pad of her thumb. When he calms, he does so slowly, his face going the slightest bit slack, his eyes beginning to close. 

Nursing makes Briony feel as sleepy and content as it must Drogo, even more fanciful and dreamy than usual. She curls up in the armchair by the window, her cheek resting against the back of the chair, and she gazes out of the window, watching as the sky slowly changes. Drogo lays skin-to-skin with her, tucked in against her shoulder, his little breaths touching like feathers on her neck. The tiny beating of his heart, and the heat of his little body, feel not unlike the warmth of a hearth after a long day away from home. 

Amaranth tiptoes into the parlor when the sky is growing dark, one hand holding a lit candle and the other a vase filled with the flowers they picked on the Hill. Briony watches as Amaranth sets the vase upon a table, then fidgets with it, arranging and rearranging the flowers until they meet some unknown specification. When Amaranth has finished with the flowers and has begun lighting the lanterns in the parlor, Briony shifts upon her chair.

“Are you awake?” Amaranth asks, and she turns from a lantern. The light throws Amaranth’s face into shadow, only edges of her hair limned by the light, like a poor substitute for gold. “Where you sleeping?”

“No,” Briony says, and she shifts again, straightening her legs and tucking Drogo closer to her neck. His breath feathers across her skin. “No, I was only dreaming.”

x   
Gandalf leaves with the first snowstorm of winter. Briony wakes to a brilliantly white sky and fat flakes slowly falling to the ground. The first storm is always quiet, the world hushing as winter begins. Briony hushes, too, padding quietly through the halls of her smial as she helps Gandalf gather his things.

“But in the snow?” she asks only once, feeling fretful and unhappy as she looks out the front window. The snow is beginning to stick to the ground, covering the edges of the little path that leads down to her gate. It seems unkind for them to part thus--her left alone in her smial, he walking alone through the snow. 

“I have spent enough seasons in one place. My dear,” Gandalf says as he takes the bread that Briony is holding out to him, “I have many tasks, many responsibilities, and I have been--” He clears his throat, then says, as he is tucking the bread into his bag, “I have been shirking them. The Shire,” he says, “is a gentle place, and your home is the gentlest of all. If I stay much longer, I will forget my duties all together.”

“And is that really so terrible?” she asks, but reprimands herself before Gandalf can. “No, that was wrong of me. I suppose I have grown used to having you here with me. I’d rather not see you go, but if you must--”

They eat hearty breakfasts, both first and second, and Briony manages to wrangle a promise of sharing elevenses out of Gandalf. She bakes a fearful number of scones, stuffed full of dried fruits and slivered nuts, glazed with honey while still steaming from the oven. 

“You should take the rest,” she says when Gandalf has pushed away his plate. 

“Of course,” Gandalf says softly, and he helps her wrap the scones in a tea towel, then in parchment paper. She is searching for a piece of string to tie up the package when Gandalf rests his hand on her shoulder, saying, “Come, my dear, it is not so for so long. I will return before you know it.”

“I know,” Briony says in a low, fierce voice. She can feel the threat of tears sticking in her throat, and she has to dash her sleeve against her eyes. “It just seems silly to leave now, when winter has just begun, and it is snowing of all things--”

“Hush,” Gandalf interrupts her, and he says, “Come, I wish to say goodbye to Drogo before I leave.”

Perhaps this is what Belladonna saw when Briony was an infant and the Old Took was still alive, when Gandalf would visit with fireworks and stories and his great grey hat. Perhaps Gandalf had bent over Briony’s bassinet as well, had traced his finger over Briony’s forehead the way he traces it over Drogo’s. Perhaps there have been dozens of hobbits before, welcomed and farewelled by Gandalf.

“If he wasn’t asleep,” Gandalf says with a sigh, but he leaves Drogo to his nap, straightening and fixing the set of his hat on his head. “Well, my dear, it is time that I leave. Come, walk me to the door and wish me well.”

Briony follows Gandalf down the length of the smial one last time, reluctance dragging her feet. When Gandalf bends at the doorway, she dutifully turns her face so that he may kiss her cheek, and when he takes her hand, she squeezes it tightly. 

“I will see you soon,” he says, “you and Drogo both.” 

And that is how he leaves, his scarf wrapped tightly about his neck, his hat pulled low over his face. The snow is falling faster now, and the little path to Briony’s gate is nearly all covered with snow. From the door, Briony can hear the soft shuff of Gandalf’s footsteps, the muffled thump of his walking stick against the paving stones. 

Gandalf doesn’t look back. Not at the gate, nor at the curve in the road. Briony watches him until she can no longer see him, and then she stands at the door, looking out at the falling snow until her toes have grown numb. When she finally steps back so that she can close her beautiful green door, the snow is sticking to the stones of the entryway, cold and wet. She half-heartedly tries to brush the snow back out onto the front step, but gives up quickly. She is cold and tired and irritable, and any effort seems to be too great an effort.

She returns to her bedroom once the door is shut and locked, and when she is there she stands over Drogo’s bassinet, her fingers resting along the walls of the basket. Drogo sleeps heavily--she doesn’t know if all babies do, or only hers--and it is easy work to lift him from his bed and carry him to her own, to lay him across her stomach once she has laid herself down. 

“Well, sweetling,” she says to him, and she pets the curl of his fist, the tiny knuckles and tinier nails. 

(She had kissed Thorin’s hands so many times, the breadth of his palm and the sharp edge of his thumbnail, the scabs that had always been opening over his knuckles. She’d kissed them gently, thinking that is how you loved someone--how you petted them, kissed them, gave them all the gentle bits of your own body and heart.) 

She pets Drogo’s little fist, touches his wrist curiously, then lays her hand over the back of his head, covering the dark curls that are so baby-fine. (This must be how you love someone--to treat them as softly and gently as you can.) He’s a warm weight on her belly, like an anchor to hold her fast to the earth, and she cups his head in her hand and murmurs, “Well, sweetling.”

x

When spring comes and the winter snow melts, Briony takes to the outdoors like she’s been freed from a prison. She fills an old wicker basket with the softest blankets she can find, then drags it out to the back path, where the rosebushes are overgrown and the lilac bushes are beginning to throw shade. When Drogo has nursed and fallen asleep, she tucks him into the basket, where he is shaded by the overhanging doorway of Bag-End and the early leaves of the lilacs. 

Holman has sent over his cousin, and Briony spends days tearing up the ground with Hamfast’s help. Hamfast is young and a little awkward, but he’s far more obedient than Briony expected from a hobbit not even in his tweens. He fetches and carries and digs beside her, and by the end of a week, they’ve managed to ready all of Briony’s gardens for the spring. 

“You’re a credit to your cousin,” Briony tells Hamfast when they’re sorting through her bulbs, searching for any winter’s rot. Hamfast looks so pleased at this that Briony has to add (mostly truthfully), “I’ve never had a better gardener, in fact.”

“Thank you,” Hamfast practically burbles, and it doesn’t escape Briony’s notice that Hamfast spends the rest of the day being particularly helpful.

It’s not hard to begin to trust Hamfast. He’s such a good lad, diligent and eager to please, and so gratifyingly happy to listen to Briony’s stories. It’s not long before they spend long afternoon hours in the shade of the back door, eating cakes spread with icing.

“You saw it?” Hamfast asks, his eyes wide and his hand holding a cake halfway to his mouth. There are crumbs all down the front of his shirt, and Briony has to fight the urge to brush the crumbs away. 

“I did,” she says. “As soon as the morning sun hit them, the trolls all turned to stone. You should have heard it, Hamfast--it sounded like a thousand rocks cracking all at once.”

She tells him dozens of stories, snatches of time spent on her journey. She sketches out the world with her words--and with her pen, too, drawing maps of Rivendell and Laketown and Erebor, as well as she can remember them. Hamfast waits for the ink to dry, and when she finally hands the maps to him, he looks at each closely, following the lines of pathways and the hatching of buildings.

“Far larger than a bear,” she says when she tells him about Beorn’s house; “I’m sure I could not have even reached his knee. His hands--as large as my door, or it at least certainly felt like it. He would pick me up in one hand--only one, Hamfast.”

But there are other things she keeps secret, tucked away beneath her tongue and within her closed fist. Thorin is a shadowy figure: “A king,” she says.

“He was proud,” she says.

“He was kind,” she says.

“He loved his mountain,” she says, and it is the most she can free from beneath her tongue, from within her fist. It is easier to tell Hamfast about the other dwarves: about Bofur’s funny hat and Oin’s ear trumpet and Balin’s writing desk. She tells Hamfast about her other dwarves, about their jokes and their laughter and all of their kindnesses, all of their adventures; she keeps Thorin and Fili and Kili close to herself, guarding their memories jealously.

“You liked them?” Hamfast asks, so many times, and each time Briony says,

“I loved them--I loved all of my dwarves. They were a rowdy bunch, but they were a decent company. They were quite wonderful, in their own ways.”

x

April passes without a knock at her door, with neither a wizard nor a company of dwarves--without even a whisper of adventure. Her flowers are all planted and sprouting, and her vegetable garden has been sown. Drogo is an enormously fat baby, quiet and placid and sweet.

Her _life_ is quiet and placid and sweet, almost as though she was never shaken from her home only two years ago. She spends hours sitting in her doorway, Drogo sleeping in his basket beside her. She smokes or she reads or she knits, and every Thursday she leaves Drogo in Hamfast’s care so that she may visit the market in Hobbiton. It is a very quiet, placid, sweet life, and the world of trolls and goblins and dragons seems very far away.

It is May, and then June, and the Hill is all over with flowers: daisies and roses by her gate, foxglove running along the pathways and lady’s mantle dripping over the lips of the Hill. She leaves the big, round windows open day and night, and all the tunnels of the smial are heavy with the heady scent of flowers. When she stands in the doorway, the back door thrown wide, she can hear the droning of bumblebees--not as fat as those found in Beorn’s hall, but just as lovely.

Drogo, fat and beautiful and sweet, spends the summer learning to crawl. He seems endlessly fascinated by the world around him, and as likely to shove a handful of blanket in his mouth as a handful of dirt and grass. It’s not a challenge to make him smile, or to even laugh: Briony blows wet kisses against his belly and mimes gnawing on his hands; she dangles pretty flowers over his face, and pretends to hide behind his blanket.

He is such a happy baby, and she thinks, _How very unlike Thorin._

“Truly, my sweet,” she tells him as she bathes him in the morning, the sunlight warm and the bees droning and Drogo laughing, “you are nothing like your father. If I weren’t your mother, I would think you were Bombur’s child.”

And that is how their summer goes: sweet, and placid, and quiet. The mums bloom, and the hollyhocks; Briony fills Bag-End with vases of goldenrod and asters, even some early blooming crocus. 

When the end of August comes, and Drogo’s birthday with it, Briony busies herself about her home. She beats rugs and scrubs floors and dusts all the ceilings, rushing back and forth in all her free moments. She plays with Drogo and comforts him when he cries, sews new clothes and mends old ones, and digs through all her things to find proper presents. She is too busy, she tells herself, to feel either sadness or regret. When her cheeks feel cold and her eyes burn, she dashes away her tears with the back of her hand, takes a deep breath, and rushes onto the next in her long list of chores.

“It seems a bit much,” Jessamine says when she visits with an armful of ribbons and twine. She sits in the parlor with Briony, wrapping the presents in butcher paper and handkerchiefs, tied with twine and ribbon. There are tags scattered over Briony’s desk, all of her first, second, and third cousins, as well as all her neighbors and friends, and anyone with whom she exchanges pleasantries while in the market.

“Hush,” Briony says mildly, “and give me your finger, I can’t fasten this knot tight enough.”

Drogo’s birthday will be quite the event. Nothing so large as the Old Took’s, but certainly larger than any other first birthdays in Hobbiton. Drogo deserves this. He deserves more. He should have--he would have--if his father--

“Oh, Briony,” Jessamine whispers, and she crawls over the floor so she can pull Briony into her arms. Briony goes without a fuss, letting Jessamine pet her hair and rock her. 

“I’m not ashamed of him,” Briony says into Jessamine’s shoulder, the words muffled by Briony’s clogged nose and the wet spot on Jessamine’s blouse. Jessamine’s hand never slows, just keeps petting through Briony’s curls. “I’m not--he’s not--”

“None of us are.” Jessamine’s voice is gentle and soothing, so much like a mother’s. Like Briony’s mother’s. “Not the Baggins, and not the Tooks.”

But it isn’t enough. Briony needs to make Jessamine understand--needs everyone to understand-- “I chose him,” she says desperately, “I wanted-- I wanted him, I thought-- I thought a child--”

She cries until Drogo wakes from his nap, until her knees have gone numb and Jessamine’s blouse is ruined from Briony’s tears. It is only Drogo’s wails that make Briony unclench her fingers from where they are clutching the loose back of Jessamine’s blouse, that make her pull away. 

“Let me,” Jessamine whispers, and she wipes Briony’s face before she stands up, saying, “Wait here, I’ll fetch him.”

And when Jessamine leaves the room, heading back towards Briony’s bedroom, Briony looks around the parlor, at the scattered presents and the piles of ribbons. She feels lost, like she has been cast adrift in the midst of the invitations. She fingers a vibrant ribbon, running the smooth satin over her thumb, and wonders how she thought a party might heal her hurts or right a lifetime of regrets.

x

Gandalf, with what must be the timing of a wizard, arrives on the day of Drogo’s birthday party. It is late morning, and Briony has been bustling about her kitchen for hours now, baking the last of the cakes and scones and pies and breads. Drogo has been cordoned in the parlor with soft, rag dolls, and whenever he cries or fusses too loudly, Briony or Jessamine or Asphodel peak into the room to check on him. 

It is one such moment--Briony ducking into the room with a plate of hot scones in her hand, brought by Drogo’s excited shriek--when there is a knock at the door. 

“Is it Amaranth?” Asphodel calls from the kitchen, and Briony reaches down to pet the top of Drogo’s head, smoothing his curls, before she patters down the hallway to the front door. 

“My dear Briony,” are Gandalf’s first words, and he smiles at her, leaning on his staff. Briony takes a sharp breath, then steps back, pulling the door further open.

“Come in,” she says, “come in--here, take a scone, you--I’m sure you’re hungry, you must be hungry--”

“Oh, my dear,” Gandalf says again, and he opens an arm for her, draws her in gently. She is happy to go--pleased to go--and she clutches his grey robe with her free hand. “I did not mean to be so long, but I had many tasks that could not be delayed.”

Briony leans heavily against Gandalf’s side for one more long moment, then takes a deep breath and steps back, telling him, “It’s fine. But you had better come in and shut the door. There’s not much time left, and we’ve still another batch of cakes to bake.”

She juggles the plate of scones and the hat that Gandalf gives her, telling him, “Yes, just in the corner, set your staff there--are you sure you wouldn’t care for a scone?”

“Perhaps one,” he says thoughtfully, and she leaves him in the parlor with a scone in his hand and Drogo looking up at him curiously.

“If he cries,” she says nervously, but Gandalf waves her off, and so she returns to the kitchen and her cousins.

By early afternoon, the party has begun. There are large, fat ribbons hanging from poles all over the top of the Hill, put up by Holman and Hamfast, and Fortinbras has managed to have dozens of tables brought up the the Row. The linens are all blindingly white and shockingly starched, and they set off the food magnificently. There are iced cakes and scones, and still-steaming pies of all sorts, savory and sweet both; there are candied fruits and glazed fruits, candied meats and glazed meats; bottles of wine and kegs of beer and even a few precious bottles of sparkling. It may be a poor imitation of one of Old Took’s parties, but it is by far the largest party Briony has ever thrown.

She’s dressed Drogo in a beautiful white dress as blindingly white and shockingly starched as the linens, with a wide collar of lace and ribbons bound to the hems. He’s been scrubbed clean until his skin is red and bright, and his curls have all been carefully brushed until they fall just so. He’s a beautiful baby, from his dark curls and blue eyes to his chubby fists and dimpled elbows. Briony brushes his curls again, twisting the loops around her fingers, then she sets him on her hip and says, “Well, my love, shall we go and see your party?”

There are a great many Tooks, and half as many Brandybucks. The Baggins are almost all out in force, as well. A year ago, it was all aunts and great-aunts and cousins, all the women Briony has always known and loved. Now her uncles have come as well, and all her boy-cousins, the hobbits with whom she had used to run through fields and catch frogs and make little mud houses and cakes.

(It is a show of force, like she had told Gandalf a year before. It is another facet to all the infighting in the Shire, the bitter arguments and unending grudges, the marriages and funerals that are all overshadowed by a question of, _Do you remember when?_ )

“He’s quite a big baby,” Donnamira says when she has swooped down upon Briony and Drogo. Donnamira is wearing a great many ribbons, in her hair and on her dress, and she takes one, waggles it in front of Drogo’s face as she speaks with Briony.

“I told your uncles about how big he is--largest hobbit babe I have ever seen. Here, give him to me.”

Briony follows her aunt through the maze of tables and chairs and hobbits, dragged along by the fluttering of Donnamira’s ribbons. Drogo fusses only the littlest bit, seemingly content with gumming at Donnamira’s ribbons and whatever else is within his reach. 

It is Hugo and Gorbadoc and Isembard and Fortinbras who catche her near one of the ribbon bedecked poles, who call her to sit with them. Hugo is frail, his hands paper-thin and shivering, and when he reaches out to hold her hands, Briony reaches back, taking his hands gently between her own.

“You remind me a great deal of my Donna,” Hugo says, and he pats her hands, blinking rheumy eyes at her. “More like a Took than a Baggins, though the Baggins are well enough, in their own way.”

There is some quiet muttering amongst the other hobbit men, and Gorbadoc shifts uneasily. Briony is licking her lips, trying to find what she should say, when Isembard says abruptly, “Well, we all know what we want. Longo isn’t a bad sort, but his Camellia and his Otho--no, I’d rather Bag-End stayed with you. It was your mother’s money, we all know that. Everyone in the Shire knows that. I won’t see my sister’s daughter thrown out--”

“No one,” Fortinbras interrupts, “is being thrown out.” He smiles at Briony, soft and gentle and with that sweet, lackadaisical way he has. Briony has always been fond of him, and she is now, more than ever before. 

“He’s a Baggins,” Fortinbras says, “but he is just as much a Took, and we will always care for our own.”

And Briony knows that the coming years will be bitter. Bag-End may not be so grand as the Old Took’s smials, nor the great smials of Bucklebury, but it is a rich home all the same, and the finest in Hobbiton. It is not something easily relinquished, neither for her, nor for Longo and Otho. It is asking a great deal, to have a smial with so much wealth given to a fatherless child.

“Thank you,” Briony says breathlessly, and when her uncles grumble amongst themselves, she rises from her chair so that she can kiss each of them, the soft wrinkles of their aged cheeks and hands. 

“Thank you,” she says again, and Hugo says,

“You were always one of my favorites. Now, where has my daughter gone off to? Find her for me, Briony?”

And that is much of the party. If there is fault to be found in her--and there must be; Briony has done many things, and a great number of them are causes for regret--there is no mention of it. Longo may be absent, and his family with him, but there are hobbits enough, relatives and friends both, and there is a great deal of laughter and gossip and singing. Drogo is passed from great-aunt to great-aunt, is cooed and remarked over, and one cousin after another catches Briony’s hand, saying:

“It is good to see a Baggins in Bag-End again.”

By the late hours of the afternoon, a great deal of food has been eaten and there are beginning to be noises of return trips home. Briony manages to reclaim Drogo, from where he has been eating crumbs of a cake on Asphodel’s lap. Drogo’s exhausted, his eyes barely able to stay open, and when Briony scoops him up, he fists his hands in her bodice and lays his head against her breast with a sigh. 

“I think,” Briony says when Drogo is sleeping on her lap, his little face turned towards her soft belly, “it is time to give the presents. Ferumbras, Primula, will you help me?”

Soon there a half-dozen young hobbits, in their teens and tweens, rushing about with presents, saying, “Mother, this one--” and “Aunty Donna, this one is for you--” And as quickly as the presents are presented, hobbits begin to leave, the eldest first. By the time the sun is setting, the Hill is quite empty, the linens on the tables flapping now that there is little food to hold them down. 

“Shall we?” Gandalf asks Briony once Fortinbras has said his final goodbyes, and Briony lifts Drogo in her arms, saying,

“Yes, I think so.”

And late that night, when Briony and Gandalf have finished her best bottle of wine, she says, “I think that I will get chickens.”

“Chickens?” Gandalf asks, and Briony hums her yes, says,

“Holman offered to give me one or two, if I wanted them. They’re very pretty--white and brown, and with so many feathers. Drogo could help me fetch the eggs, and to feed them--it would be something to look forward to, for next spring.”

She can hear crickets out past the open window, and the rustle of wind. If she were at the top of the Hill, she thinks she would be able to see stars as far as the night sky is spread, from the far west to the far east. (She imagines, for a moment--a moment filled with all the romanticism of a Took--of the linens on the tables, like funeral shrouds laid over crypts. She thinks of Thorin, and Fili, and Kili, and a mountain she was sent away from nearly two years ago. The gold there had shone like starlight, glittering with gems and mithril, the light from Thorin’s lantern shattering over all the gorgeous walls of Erebor.)

“Will you leave soon?” she asks Gandalf, and she rolls her cup in between her hands, the metal cold against her palms. Gandalf shifts beside her, turning his face away so that he can blow a smoke ring toward the open window and the stars.

“Soon,” he says, “but not for some days.”

“Good,” Briony says, and it is good. It’s a comfort, to know that there will be another in her home, that she will have someone to pass the long night hours with, to smoke and drink and wait quietly for the dawn. 

(There are strings of pearls tucked away in her bedroom, in the bottom of her glory chest. They are grey and pink and purple and cream, the colors of gentle dawns. When she lays them against her skin, against her mouth, they are cool and smooth, like the morning air, like the promise of an east.)

She rocks in her chair for some minutes more, listening to the creak of Belladonna’s chair, the pretty chair made for a pretty smial, a pretty life of pretty trinkets and pretty treasures. Briony has treasures just as pretty as Belladonna’s--trinkets and gifts, and a child with eyes the blue of robin eggs. Like mother, like daughter. She says so to Gandalf, and he sighs heavily, saying,

“All the marvelous daughters of Gerontius Took. Shall we open another bottle?”

She thinks of it, of wandering to her wine cellar to fetch another bottle; of drinking as the stars slowly pass over the night sky. She rocks in her mother’s chair, and then she stands, reaching out to catch the chair and stop its rocking.

“I think,” she says, “I will go to bed. I will see you in the morning, Gandalf.”


End file.
